Men of Stone (The Faded Earth Book 3)

by Joshua Guess

  As always, Beck was astounded by the shortness of the distance one had to travel from Brighton to end up in entirely different country. The pervasive orange dust extended dozens of miles from the Rez but tapered off eventually, freeing the land from its choking weight. She had seen distant views of old world cities destroyed in nuclear fire, arid wastelands in the middle of otherwise verdant plains where weapons destroyed forever the capacity for things to grow, yet only a hundred miles west of her home the land could not have been move lush.

  The ample wildlife here was why the Watch set up dispensers for the cure. The Pales that attacked Brighton and other Rezzes in the west filtered in from here. This was where the food was.

  They rolled to a stop half a mile from what had once been a small town, now halfway reclaimed by the land. The grass here was tall and golden, with copses of trees to be found in every direction. The town itself was the target; Pales often made lairs inside buildings. That was where other teams had set up the dispensers for the cure.

  “Lin, you and Tala will stay here and get the cage ready,” Beck said. Lin wore armor like the rest of them, but was also the only person Beck had ever seen actually manage to look timid while doing so. Even Parker who had only the barest training in its use, wore his with relative confidence.

  “Of course,” Lin said, hopping out of the cab. “We’ll be ready when you are.” Tala only shrugged.

  The cage wasn’t actually a cage, but a cube of polymer eight feet tall and with a footprint six feet on a side. Its wall were tough enough to hold back someone wearing armor—its original purpose—so a normal human posed no challenge at all.

  “The rest of you are with me,” Beck said. “We’re doing a defensive diamond with me on point, Parker in the middle.” She was giving the orders because it was expected. They knew how this worked. Eshton had cautioned her early on to always make sure to keep giving them, however, because growing lax might cause someone to not obey at a critical moment.

  They moved out at a comfortable walk, with Jeremy sending out small aerial and ground drones while they closed the distance. The aerial drones were rare and tightly controlled, but Beck figured if she had infinite requisition authority, why not use it? It wasn’t like she was planning to use them as weapons platforms the way early dissidents in the first days of the Protectorate had, after all. She just wanted a bird’s eye view to keep her people safe and hopefully spot their prey.

  “Not showing much,” Jeremy said as he watched the drone feeds. All of them ran simple automated search patterns, though he could take control at any time. “Here, let me shoot the feeds to your suits. I’ll set them to alternate through camera types every five seconds.”

  Beck watched the colorful sight of a thermal imaging camera for a few seconds before deciding she agreed with his assessment completely. The last time she’d seen video of this place, it was teeming with Pales. At least fifty of them, which meant as many as two hundred probably lived here. They hunted in small groups, but lots of them. The general rule was presume a population four times larger than what you could see.

  Now, no bodies moved in the streets. It was possible they were all inside at once, which Beck thought at least plausible if they’d heard the transport roll in. Pales were aggressive, though. They tended to attack people when they saw them.

  “Looks like your cure did the job too well,” Jen quipped over the channel. “Think we should just pack it in and go to the secondary site?”

  “Hmm, I don’t think so,” Parker said. He sounded distracted, which Beck knew was a sign he’d sunk his claws into something. “No. We’re good here.”

  “You think they’re hiding from us?” Jen asked.

  “Possibly,” Parker said. “I can’t be sure. But something is off. Remy has a saying she likes to use in the lab, and I think it applies. Look for what isn’t there.”

  Beck frowned. “What do you mean? There aren’t any Pales on the scopes.”

  “That’s true,” Parker agreed. “But notice—there aren’t any animals, either. Something here scared them off.”

  *

  Building-to-building searches were dangerous and Beck hated them, so they cheated. Rather than stuff themselves through doorways where enemies could be waiting with traps Eshton had described in gruesome detail, the team moved toward a given building and let Jeremy send in recon drones. Most were as expected; buildings slowly drifting toward ruin through the entropy of exposure to the elements.

  Here and there they found signs of relatively recent use. Layers of dust not quite as thick as others, splatters of blood from kills dragged in and shared among a swarm. It was only when they moved away from the residential areas of the small town—really, more of a village—that they began to see fresher evidence.

  So to speak.

  “That,” Wojcik said as they stepped inside the small gymnasium of what had once been a school, “is a lot of bodies.”

  Jen, despite being on canned air and wearing a suit specifically designed to cut her off from the world around her, reared back and put a hand over her mouth by reflex. “Holy shit. Holy shit. That’s fucking awful.”

  The gym was packed with corpses in one state of decay or another. Some Pales appeared to have died fairly early in the process, looking almost as if they were sleeping but for the wide-open eyes. Others were less…firm. Bodies varied in how much effect the cure had, some reverting close to human before succumbing, others partway through. The deaths were recent. Many of the partial transformations had patches of stony skin sloughing off to reveal fresh pink or brown flesh beneath.

  “If you’re gonna throw up, run outside,” Wojcik said to Jen, who stood in uncharacteristic silence after her outburst.

  Beck nodded. “He’s being an ass, but he’s right. Go outside if you need to. This is horrifying. No one will give you shit about it.” The threat was clear, she hoped. Anyone who did would answer to her.

  Parker moved toward the nearest body and knelt down beside it. He seemed unaffected as he opened his kit and began taking samples. “This is more effective than I thought it would be. I knew the genetic alterations in the Pale population were unstable, but for so many to die this close together is unexpected.”

  “Food,” Lucia said suddenly. “It’s the food. They hunt in groups, yeah? It’s how they bring down large game. Some got sicker than others, and the ones who could still hunt couldn’t bring in enough to eat. Then they got too sick to hunt, and the problem compounded. I bet a lot of them starved.”

  Parker’s helmet turned her direction. “Huh. That actually makes a lot of sense. More than you probably know. The human body needs a lot of energy and fuel to undergo the sort of massive alterations the cure forces on Pales. I’d say somewhere around half again as many calories at a minimum. The less food they had, the more their bodies ate themselves trying to make the change, and the weaker they got.”

  Beck flipped her camera over to thermal imaging. “Look for any warm spots. Gross as it may be, this is a bunch of meat sitting around. If there are any cured Pales nearby, they may be eating the dead to live.”

  What unfolded in the minutes after that statement was enough to turn any stomach. Beck teamed up with Jen to haul bodies out of piles, inspecting every nook and cranny of the gym for signs of recent habitation. Though she didn’t speak it out loud, Beck thought one of the bodies might actually be a cured Pale playing dead. Hiding in a pile of corpses was no one’s idea of a fun Saturday night, but the damn things were smart enough to try it.

  They came up empty.

  “Jeremy, you want to send those drones through the rest of the school?” Beck asked.

  He nodded and got to work. Everyone else had to wait. Not long, as it turned out.

  “Got something,” Jeremy said, and the drone feed popped up on every HUD. “Looks like a live one.”

  Parker stood from his work, excitement in every line of his posture. “Pale or cured?”

  “I’m just the drone guy,” Jeremy said bemusedl
y. “That’s your area of expertise.”

  Beck smiled. “Well, let’s not dick around. Lead the way, Jeremy.”

  The school had fewer than a dozen classrooms, but their target was in none of them. Instead Jeremy led them to the utility area and through its massive wooden doors. An ancient boiler sat rusting and silent, surrounded by cobwebs thick enough to knit a blanket. That a body passed through was obvious. Between the scuffs in the accumulated grime and large rents in the webs, Beck guessed their prey had come through near the time the team entered the building.

  She switched to night vision and moved deeper into the gloomy, closed-off room.

  “Stop,” she said a few moments later. “No one else move. Do nothing without a direct order.”

  “Boss?” Wojcik said, confusion in his voice.

  Beck opened her armor and stepped out, taking cautious steps forward. “It’s okay,” she said, her tone as comforting and calm as she could make it. “We’re not going to hurt you.” She knelt down and put a hand forward.

  Slowly, tentatively, a small face appeared from the shadows. Bald and covered in the odd scars left behind when the stone skin of Pale flesh returned to human, a child was revealed. Beck couldn’t tell its sex at a glance, only how terrified they looked.

  “You’re okay,” she said, giving her hand a little shake. “You can come with me.”

  After a long pause, small fingers reached forward and grasped hers.

  “This isn’t supposed to be possible,” Parker said.

  Beck didn’t respond to him, intent on not startling the child. She knew what he meant, however. The Fade slowed aging down by an incredible degree, but it still happened. The kid looked all of twelve or thirteen, but after a hundred years of being infected there should have been no children left among them.

  Whatever this child represented, their understanding of the world changed forever.

  8

  It took a week for Parker to reach a conclusion, and when he did it required Beck and Stein to come to him. It was made clear that whatever he discovered should not be transmitted in any way, and Parker was too valuable to risk moving into a Rez. Letting him out into the badlands with an armed escort was bad enough.

  Which was why the pair of women found themselves in Movement headquarters, seated in a couple comfortable chairs in one side of Parker’s lab. Finding the time to sneak away hadn’t been easy for Stein, though Beck had much more flexibility as an apparently lowly Sentinel.

  Remy joined them just before Parker himself entered the room. He was unshaven and more disheveled than usual, hair unkempt and eyes tired. He flopped down into another of the chairs. There was no formality to worry about—once the four of them were in the same place, he started talking.

  “I’m pretty sure that little girl was birthed by Pales,” he said without preamble.

  Beck had hoped for some—any—other conclusion, but couldn’t muster the energy to be surprised. “How sure is pretty sure?”

  He chewed his lip thoughtfully for a second. “In the sense that I can’t be absolutely sure beyond doubt but am convinced by overwhelming evidence that I’m right.”

  Stein cleared her throat. “So there’s no chance she’s just a Remnant kid taken by the Fade?”

  To Beck’s surprise, it was Remy who answered. “No. Almost all Remnants are immune. They fight off the artificial cells that try to introduce the altered genetic material that makes up the Fade. Even if one of them with recessive genes was infected, there would be other evidence they were from that population.”

  “Such as?” Stein asked, looking at Parker.

  He shook his head with a slight smile and put his hands up. “Oh, no. I dug into the genetics, but Remy was actually the one to figure it out.”

  Beck glanced at the young woman, only a few years older than herself, expectantly. She saw pride on Remy’s face. She’d been a lab technician before being forced to hide here, and rather than let protective custody send her into a spiral, she threw herself into the work. Beck felt a sense of kinship with her—when she had taken the job in the mine what felt like a lifetime ago, she’d thrown herself into learning about engineering and programming in much the same way.

  “Vaccinations,” Remy said. “This kid has never had any. If she was somehow from the old world, which seems unlikely given her apparent age, she’d have some antibodies from vaccinations we could use as markers. Same if she was from the Protectorate. Remnants don’t have the broad array we do, but there are several basic ones they manufacture and distribute. This girl has none of them.”

  Stein tapped a finger against her lips. “It’s possible she came from a Remnant community that isn’t part of the larger network as Canaan. One of the kind that live isolated from the rest.”

  The bad guys, she didn’t say. Beck understood the restraint. Stein was publicly trying to forge an alliance with Remnants—even thinking of any of them as enemies could color her behavior and words. Which didn’t change the fact that a small number of them did live far away from others and hated the Protectorate with a vitriol bordering on insanity. As Scott correctly told the crowd, they were known to point Pales toward Rezzes and even supply them with tools.

  Remy shook her head. “We thought about that, too. Thing is, the girl does have some antibodies she didn’t develop herself. Couldn’t have. The sort you get from your mother to help you stay alive. In normal people, those vanish after a few months as the baby develops their own immune system. Rose has some that are definitely from a Pale and have persisted her entire life.”

  Stein’s eyebrows arched. “Rose?”

  “She needed a name,” Remy said. “Parker gave it to her.”

  He shrugged, a slight flush climbing his face. “It was my mother’s name.”

  “So you know these antibodies come from a Pale because they’ve lasted so long?” Beck asked, wanting clarity. Biology wasn’t her specialty.

  “Well, that and the fact that they contain altered Pale DNA, yeah,” Remy said. “These aren’t like antibodies as we normally think of them. They’re way more complex than just proteins. As conclusive proof goes, it’s close to indisputable.”

  “Holy shit,” Stein said, rubbing a hand down her face. “This is wonderful. Just what we needed. Pales that can give birth.”

  “It gives them a whole new dimension,” Parker agreed. “Not just able to give birth, but with enough parental instinct to feed and care for a baby. The genetic alterations of the Fade aren’t heritable, but the child would have become infected right after birth anyway. Which brings us to the nail in the coffin. She had a small piece of metal embedded just below her ribs on the left side of her body. We removed it.”

  Parker pulled a polymer container from a pocket and handed it to Stein with a slight clink. The Commander held it up and studied it for a few seconds before her eyes widened in recognition. “This is from a flechette round. The Watch stopped using those fifteen years ago. Not enough stopping power.”

  “For Pales,” Remy said. “They kill people just fine. Which means that little bit of metal hit the girl when her skin was still calcified. Probably fired into a crowd of Pales—the Watchman who did it couldn’t have seen her. He would have reported it.”

  Beck did the math instinctively. Fifteen was of course a few years older than the girl looked, but it didn’t stop there. To have been in a crowd of adult Pales, she would almost certainly have been big enough to walk on her own, probably old enough to run away if necessary. That, combined with the years it took the toughened skin to form, made her at least twenty. The fastest change Beck had ever read about needed five years to complete.

  “Does anyone here think we just happened upon the only child ever born to Pales?” Stein asked suddenly, breaking Beck’s reverie. “No? Then we have to accept the idea that these things are out there breeding, have been for decades, and we didn’t know it. Probably because they hide deeper in the badlands to do it safely. They know we won’t hunt them down if they don’t give us
a reason.”

  “Oh,” Beck said, Stein’s point suddenly driven home. “If that’s true, then the cure…”

  Stein nodded, her face unreadable. “Yeah, kid. At best, it’s genocide.”

  *

  For once, Beck was glad she didn’t have to make policy. The moral implications of Pales as a breeding population were murky and complicated. Seeing Rose didn’t help.

  The girl was kept in a fairly spacious room with more comforts than some families in the Protectorate were afforded. Her bed was larger than she needed—all the beds here were meant for adults—and the windows made sure she knew she was never alone. It was originally an observation room, meant for Pales and secure enough to hold up to their immense strength. It still served that purpose, but the kid was kept under better conditions than any previous occupant had been.

  Beck watched for a few minutes as Rose, now clad in simple woven polymer clothing, sat coloring. The girl was so fascinated by the apparent magic by which streaks of color appeared on the page that she never looked up. Never saw Beck.

  On a whim, Beck stepped over to the door and knocked. Through its window Beck saw Rose look up. Not the startled movement of a frightened animal, but as human a reaction as she had ever seen.

  She opened the door and stepped into the room.

  “Drawing, huh?” Beck asked. She didn’t expect an answer. She didn’t get one.

  Instead Rose looked at her with serious, intelligent eyes. Beck ambled over to one of the chairs and gestured at it. Rose glanced from her to the chair, then nodded.

  Well. That was interesting. With even the limited data set created by her few visitors, she had already begun to understand parts of the basic social structure of other human beings. Beck eased herself onto the seat and leaned forward with elbows on her knees.